2022-Korea-Showcase-Aura-Intelligent-Systems

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SPEAKER: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

JUNGAH LEE: Thank you. My name is Jungah Lee, founder and CEO of Aura Intelligent Systems. At Aura, we are reimagining radar, which is 100-year-old technology, for safe mobility. My association with MIT is through Activate Entrepreneur Fellowship supported by MIT Lincoln Lab.

There's growing need to have spatial awareness, good spatial sensing solution for safe navigation and autonomous mobility. This includes automotive applications, industrial and agricultural automation, and robotics, and also going to urban air mobility, defense, surveillance, and environmental sensing applications, and going to Metaverse, 6G consumer applications.

There's another really good solution. If we focus on automotive application, let's look at what is happening. Coming out of COVID, US traffic casualties surged to 16-year high in 2021, resulting in 43,000 lives on the road. And this number is a staggering 1.3 million people globally.

We need a solution. Hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on autonomous technologies and sensor technologies, but we don't have a solution. The reason is it's such a difficult problem. There are a lot of corner cases we have to deal with. And for the sensor technology itself, we have to deal with a very complex environment with lots of cars and pedestrians and also harsh weather conditions such as driving in foggy and snowy conditions.

Let's take a look at the existing sensor technologies for automotive applications. Cameras are good because they have excellent resolution, and it's very cheap. But cameras typically don't have native 3D information. LiDAR comes into play to provide accurate 3D information. The resolution is excellent. But today, it's still very expensive. And LiDAR is susceptible to environmental conditions such as fog, snow, and dust.

Today's radars recover this environmental dependency, but today's radar still suffers from low resolution and false positives due to interference, et cetera. So we addressed these problems with a new technology.

Because of these limitations of the radar technology, industry is going through tectonic shift from analog to digital technology. Radar is one of the rare technologies that's still relying on analog. We need very special hardware to generate the waveform, the signal. And it suffers from interference. We have lots of radars. Each car has four to 12 radars-- going to have four to 12 readers for sensing.

And that is creating mutual interference. The reason it's still used by the market leaders is that the complexity of the receiver is relatively simple. But, going forward, we need a better solution-- digital technology. People have known that by software. We generate advanced capability. We can generate interference resiliency, but system complexity has hindered wide adoption of digital technology.

But because of this shift, it's creating opportunity for startups like Aura. So with our technology moving away from these [INAUDIBLE] boxes without lots of capability-- 12 pixels, very low resolution-- we provide a modular and advanced solution, starting with a two-chip programmable solution, going to a single chip as you see, providing very, very high resolution.

So with our technology, we handle interference and urban multiples with our patented digital technology. We go two times longer distance than the existing legacy technology for the same transmit power. And we don't blow up the system complexity. We are still 40% smaller and cheaper than the best-in-class technology.

And all this is happening because of our IP in the digital technology and leveraging best-in-class 5G hardware from mobile phones. So there's a huge market opportunity for Aura. Our primary market is automotive radar. It's expected to grow to $12.8 billion by 2027. And we see a great opportunity to solve the performance and the interference problem in the automotive application.

There is a bigger market in the consumer space looking at touchless sensors for user interfaces going to gesture based control and device applications to covert applications. That market is expected to grow to $38 billion. And that's adjacent market opportunity for us. So here's our key milestone with the initial technology development and validation.

Through funding from NSF SBIR, Air Force Urban Air Mobility Program, and also DARPA working with MIT Lincoln Lab, we completed our prototype development and did a robotics dual-use defense and commercial dual-use pilot. And we are working on developing commercial partnership. And we are going to scale our prototype to a commercial product.

Our target for first product launch is 2024. And we are looking for POC partners, primarily automotive OEMs and tier ones, and also electronics and module manufacturing partnership. And by 2025, our chip product will be launched, which will address the price and form factor-- much smaller form factor.

OK, so that's about it. And last but not least, I'd like to mention that, according to Gordon Moore in his 1965 publication, with the availability of small form factor integrated phased antenna array is going to revolutionize radar application. That was predicted. That did not happen so far.

But thanks to the advances of 5G and millimeter wave technology, that hardware is there. And we are here to revolutionize radar. Thank you very much. And if you want to discuss further, yeah, I'll be next door.

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